


superglued human

by brucewaynery



Series: happy steve bingo fills [7]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Post-Avengers (2012), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, spoilers hes not doing the best, thats it! thats the whole fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 06:28:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21471541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucewaynery/pseuds/brucewaynery
Summary: No one really touches Steve anymore.He didn’t even realise, not really, not until Stark put his hand on the small of his back to move him out of the way, and Steve almost broke his hand with the coffee pot.(Hugs, happy steve bingo)
Relationships: Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Series: happy steve bingo fills [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495793
Comments: 18
Kudos: 211
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	superglued human

No one really touches Steve anymore. 

He grew up rough-housing with Bucky and the other kids on the block, then in the army, despite being so very antithetical to everyone else, he was accepted, and in the trenches and on the front line, friendly touches, teasing slaps and quick hugs were as common as the shrill screaming of the shells, the constant comfort of the camaraderie, the visceral need to be there, physically, for one another, surrounded them, almost as a protective layer against the horrors of the battlefield, or more, the reminder that the war wasn’t all they had, that the war wasn’t all bad, and the reassurance that, among all this death and destruction, there was life, right beside them, warm and bright.

In the modern era, there’s no life or death situation, he supposes that he could go back to the war, there’s always a war somewhere, something to fight for, someone to fight, but everything going on in the middle east… that’s not his war, it’s the war of the rich played through young men and women. Steve wants nothing to do with it. (Nevermind that he probably has no idea how to work his way around a battlefield anymore, especially if he can barely go in a grocery shop without breaking down, but that’s a conversation for another time.)

The social conventions seem to be almost flipped, among friends, there’s none of that roughhousing anymore. Or maybe he’s just not close enough to anyone, or maybe he’s too dangerous.

Somehow, over the past seven decades, he’s been immortalised in the public eye as less of a sickly guy who got miraculously lucky at best (and a liberal science-experiment freak at worst), and more of an actual miracle, an unreachable god, a myth, he’d been given something more than celebrity status, and no-one dares to lay a hand on the untouchable.

He didn’t even realise, not really, not until Stark put his hand on the small of his back to move him out of the way, and Steve almost broke his hand with the coffee pot. 

“Damn, Rogers, jumpy much? Are you sure you should be drinking that?” Stark mutters, moving away and rummages around in a different drawer.

“Sorry.” Steve says, clipped, feeling suffocated and smothered and untethered and too small all at the same time, and he can still feel the ghost of his hand, warm and gentle, despite barely touching him for a second, and it means absolutely nothing to Stark, because why would it?

Stark leaves the kitchen with one last, pointed look and Steve has to remind himself to move. 

Without thinking, he manages to end up on the roof, leaning over the barrier and watching the cars trickle down the streets, with a half-burnt cigarette dangling between his fingers, and a half-empty pack in his other. He can’t tell if the pack had been new or not, and he can’t bring himself to care. In the back of his mind, he can hear Bucky hitting him upside the head for the carelessness and Dum Dum calling him Captain Imperfect, leaning into him in a half-hearted shove and a lazy grin.

He misses it so much it hurts.

He takes one last pull, slowly streams the smoke out through his lips, watching it disperse against the winter morning sky; thick, opaque, then gossamer-like and entierly transparent and melded into the atmosphere. He lets the short, burnt stub fall from his fingers and crushes it under his heel, like it’s brethren.

After that morning, he notices more. During the mandatory film nights, he’s the one on the armchair, separate from everyone else on the sofa, in SHIELD he gets nods of respect from afar, where Stark, who takes delight in referring to the SHIELD agents as ‘gremlin’ and Barton, who, for the most part, still looks like an agent, even Thor, an alien, who, somehow, is more human than Steve feels most of the time, are friendly with everyone. With the team, he supposes it’s because, technically, he’s the CO and no-one wants to joke around with the CO, right?

So he spends the next movie night in the gym, working on his jujitsu with a dummy and asking JARVIS to analyse his moves and give him improvements, and no-one asks after him, and that’s for the best, really, because that means that he’s left alone to practice and improve, and it’s best for his focus. 

(And it doesn’t matter if, at night, he buries himself under every blanket he can find, it doesn’t. It doesn’t particularly affect the team, if, after realising that nothing really replicates what he wants, not even close to thirty blankets, he goes up to the roof to watch the city he used to call home through the blurry haze of nicotine and insomnia.)

Moreover, he can’t be weak in front of the team, a good CO is a respected CO, and he’s hardly respected as is (he’s glad that they never had time to properly test his enhancements, and that SHIELD never bothered, because his hearing range is longer than they think), so appearing weak, wanting a gentle touch (and the way he is, so strong and inhumanely powerful, what part of him needs ‘gentle’), he’d lose what little respect he’s just about managed to gain.

Foolishly, he’d thought that he was respected at least a minuscule amount, but all of that makes itself apparent as a fantasy after a mild destruction of Central Park.

“Stark! I expect you to listen to me in the field, going off by yourself, especially into danger isn’t what we do,” Steve says, after they’ve successfully caught and detained a greasy, mid-twenties college dropout with a vengeance against the world.

“I can’t help it if your commands are shit!” Stark growls through the modulator.

“A good team works cohesively and looks out for and respects one another!” Steve doesn’t hate him, not at all, but he makes him want to lose all the composure he’s managed to hold together and cut up the suit with his shield.

“And a good leader makes the right calls.”

The rest goes unsaid. 

The next week, while everyone is watching Indiana Jones (“Cap you sure you don’t want to join us? I promise Harrison Ford is just as good as they make him out to be,” Tony asks, out of politeness. Steve has no idea who Harrison Ford is, or what they say about him), he’s swinging, jumping and flipping around the weird, fifteen-foot-long metal bars, asking JARVIS to move them, faster and faster until he’s suddenly thrown back a few <strike>years</strike> decades, back when he first when to Coney Island and went on the Cyclone first, pushing a quarter into the operators hand and tugging on Bucky’s forearm, and he falls off the top of the beam, on to the hardwood with a dull thud.

Pain flares up his right side, white-hot and sudden, flooding his body and blinding his mind. He’s not going to cry. Because he’s endured much worse than this, normal humans have endured so, so much more than this, he’s crashed into the Arctic sea, not even two storeys is nothing.

“Captain Rogers, would you like for me to inform the Avengers Team,” JARVIS asks, soft, washing over Steve’s heavy exhales.

“No thank you, scan me for any fractures?” Steve says, shifting so he’s splayed out across the floor, allowing for JARVIS to scan him. When he first met JARVIS he’d been suspicious and distrustful, merely on principle, but within a grand total of five interactions, JARVIS had immediately become one of Steve’s favourite things about the modern era.

“Your right shoulder is dislocated, Captain, but no fractures have been detected,” JARVIS informs him.

Steve slowly sits up, leaning against the wall, grips his right bicep tight and, without any preamble, shoves his shoulder back where it should be, biting down on his lip, ignoring JARVIS’ when he begins to issue out a warning, then listening to him as he guides him through the motions to make sure he didn’t trap a nerve.

Steve resists the urge to just lie there and go to sleep, staring up at the metal rafters and long fluorescent lights, he manages to get himself up, a ridiculously Herculean effort, and walks out of the gym, bypassing the elevator for the roof access. 

He needs a smoke. And a drink.

Tony, icepack in hand, quietly follows him up to the roof, ignoring JARVIS’ flashing ‘Sir, that may not be advisable’ message. He can’t remember when he’d programmed that, but he’d be willing to bet that Rhodey did. He keeps his footsteps light, all that sneak-training with Natasha (and something he remembers from when he was still living with Howard) finally coming into use.

He not entirely sure what he was expecting Captain America to do almost a hundred stories above New York, but burning his way through a pack of Lucky Strikes wasn’t one of them. 

“I have ice, if you want it,” Tony calls, a couple feet away from him.

He visibly startles, dropping the cigarette over the balcony. Tony makes a mental note to make sure that the bots clear it up from the landing pad it probably fell on. He pretends it’s because he can’t have trash there, lest it messes… something up, ad not because, yeah, even though Rogers is weird and distant, and simultaneously like a perpetually disappointed father, a demanding manager, a military drill sergeant, and a lost child, he doesn’t want him to have the added of the team hounding him for smoking, because, let’s be real, if they haven’t realised it now, it wouldn’t be that hard for them to figure out that Steve was the cause of the stray cigarette butt (part of him is slightly horrified that he knows the team that well, another deals with the realisation of just how young Barton and Nat are (young enough that they don’t remember a world without anti-smoking PSAs).

Rogers is still for a beat, so much so that Tony thinks he’s dreaming, then he’s moving, turning around, but not coming any closer. Tony waves the icepack at him, “For the shoulder,” he adds, just because he thinks he should be saying something, the silence stifling.

Rogers looks confused, the schools his face carefully blank again, “JARVIS?” he asks, before Tony can tell him.

Tony nods a confirmation, then takes a step towards him, letting out a mental breath he wasn’t aware he was holding when Rogers doesn’t move back, and lets him come to a stop maybe a foot away. Close enough that he could see just how red his shoulder was. Wordlessly, he raises the icepack and brings it near, waiting for a nod, or any indication to carry on. Rogers tilts his head, almost imperceptibly, a tiny angle change, almost as if he was actively fighting his instincts to accept help, or forcing himself to.

Tony steps even closer, close enough that the air between them becomes brumous, translucent with it, but Tony can see him clearer than before. He presses the icepack gently against his shoulder, holding onto his bicep for leverage, pretending not to notice his small wince.

“Thank you,” Rogers says, after a few seconds, quiet, and seems to debate saying something, (out of nowhere, Tony’s mind begins to wish that he does, that he shares something, not because he wants to know the ins and out of Captain America, not to know exactly where to poke next time they get into an argument, but because he wants to know Steve Rogers, he wants him to be human for five seconds, instead of this impossibly hard to reach god) before he eventually decides not to, and takes the icepack, gently pushing Tony’s hand away and taking a step back, breaking the moment.

Just before it’s too long to say anything, Tony replies, “Anytime, Steve,” and leaves him to it, pretending not to notice just how foreign his name sounds over his tongue.

That night, Steve doesn’t sleep and burns his way through so many cigarettes that he has to leave to get more, instead.

It’s ridiculous and absurd and Steve can’t figure out why Stark did it or what his end goal was, or how he’d let himself get careless enough that the team he was meant to be responsible for, is starting to take care of him, when he should be able to handle it himself. It does dawn on Steve, eventually, even if it takes far too long, that Stark was just making sure that he was healed in case of an impromptu fight (not that any of them were ...promptu), for the effectiveness of them as a whole. 

He hates how much it hurts that it wasn’t out of friendship, because he has no right whatsoever to feel that when he’d never made any effort to be friends, and it was too late now anyway. 

It’s dawn when he makes a tactical decision, the sun casting gorgeous orange-pink streaks across a cold, pale sky, the highrises and skyscrapers dark against it. The sight makes him long for charcoal and vivid, staining chalks. He stubbornly shoves it down, razes it with thoughts of responsibility and image and reputation and everything he wants to run from. He shoves that want down with it.

It’s early enough that the tower is utterly, eerily silent. Even though he spends most of his time on the roof, his hearing is good enough, or, rather, New York City is unceasingly clamorous to a point where it was never silent, and when he sleeps, he wouldn’t count that as silence either. Even alone in the gym, he makes sound, grunts and hits and slams echoing off the walls. But now, he can’t hear a thing.

It surprises him how calming it is.

Growing up, if he couldn’t hear anything, that was cause for a visit to the doctors, and when his ears were in as good a condition as they were ever going to be, the city was never silent, not even at night or pre-dawn, and if their apartment was ever silent, it meant that either: everyone was out, or everything was broken. The hospitals he spent lifetimes in never strayed near to moderate, let alone quiet, and the less said about the battlefield, the better.

He crashed to Peggy’s cries and the sounds of rushing water and woke to a radio, then the unrelenting dissonance of the future.

The silence, because this is the future and everything is, somehow, confusingly, incredibly, so, unbearably loud, gives him comfort.

It doesn’t last long.

He’s out his door with everything he needs in a backpack, when Star-- Tony, when Tony calls him.

“Hey, Cap, you wanna join me for ice cream?”

Tony’s half-awake and barely processing anything (which still means that he could take a successful crack at the IMO (every time he’d done it, he’d been hammered, and gotten somewhere in the top 10)), but JARVIS had told him that Steve was probably planning to run away (_Based on behaviour similar to your own, Sir_), and that was no bueno.

“Tony?”

“Yuh huh.”

Tony can’t really tell, because of the way the light lands, but he’s pretty sure that Steve narrows his eyes at him.

“Are you sleepwalking?”

He coming closer now, which seems to be the goal here, “Tony, Tony, what are you doing? Go to bed.”

And that just lights up his anti-authoritarian instincts, shocking him awake more than a black Irish coffee (well, strong black coffee with however much whiskey he needed) would.

“You’re only the boss of me in the field, Rogers, and barely even then,” Tony scowls, before he can think.

He watches Rogers’ face harden up, gone were the soft, concerned looks of a <strike>friend</strike> fellow teammate, and instead replaced with a skilled and scathing adversary. 

He prepares himself for a blow, and for JARVIS to either split them up himself, or to call someone else to, but Rogers just sighs, and for the first time in half a year, he sees the fight, usually so bright and blazing brighter than the sun, unwavering and steadfast perseverance that makes him impossible to be around, ninety-nine percent of the time, but a damn inspiration in the field, he watches it abandon him, stream out like the smoke earlier.

“It’s always going to be two steps back for every one forward with you, isn’t it?”

That line from anyone else would have been condescending, their verbal 1-1-2, but from Rogers now feels like an admission, and washes him with guilt. All he can do is watch as he walks past him to the elevator.

“Thank you, though, Tony, for allowing me those forward steps,” he says, as the doors close, and Tony belatedly realises that he was wearing a backpack, and a check into his room, then a scan of the security tapes, confirms that he just let Rogers go.

He needs a drink. And a nap.

He takes the nap because JARVIS warns him against the drink with a threat to wake up Nat, and he may be nearly middle-aged, but he still enjoys sex with all his parts where they’re meant to be.

When he wakes up, there’s a single email form Fury.

_I don’t know what you’ve done, but Rogers is staying on our premises indefinitely. ‘For the good of the team’._

Well, at least he hasn’t gone to Bumfuck Nowhere, America. So, logically, he shouldn’t feel, somehow, more guilty than before, but here he is.

Tony goes to SHIELD. In the suit, because who do you take him for? It takes him depressingly little time to hack into the files and the cameras to find out where Steve’s staying, and then bypasses that all together to find where the gym is.

He finds him pummelling a heavybag without gloves or bandages.

“What’d the bag do to you, Steve?” Tony asks, stepping out the suit, his name falls more naturally this time, and he vows to call him by his actual name more often, because it’s less syllables than ‘Rogers’, and definitely not because he doesn’t think he’s heard anyone call him ‘Steve’, ever.

Steve does what he did earlier on the roof; freeze, pause, then turn, but this time, he’s far more guarded.

“What do you want, Stark?”

Tony takes one, long, lingering look at him, and says something he’d never thought he would (and he just knows that whichever baby agents are on monitor duty right now are going to be laughing their asses off) to Captain America, nevermind Steve Rogers.

“I’m here to apologise--”

Steve interrupts him. “There’s no need, I overstepped and all I can ask of you is to at least consider and respect my role as leader in the field.”

He looks so stoic and serious, and if he didn’t know any better, he’d never realise that he’d been lying on the floor half-broken yesterday. He’s so, utterly, heartbreakingly, devoid of emotion, instead full of a steel-like strength, unnatural. It occurs to him, faintly, just how young he is, barely thirty, over a decade younger than Tony himself, youngest of the team and yet, expected to do so much. Because no one realised. Or noticed. Or cared.

“Listen, Steve. Are you okay?”

He gives him an odd look, “Stark, if you’re here to make fun--”

“Steve.”

“Stark.”

“Steve.”

“Tony.”

Tony smiles at that, and it’s nowhere near a smile, or a half-smile, but Steve does stop scowling, and he’s counting that as a win.

“Ice cream offer’s still open,” Tony says, and Steve’s guards go right back up.

“I think you’d be better off taking Barton--”

“Do you think I can take him anywhere outside?”

“Romanoff--”

“Solely sorbet.”

“Banner--”

“Lactose intolerant.”

“Thor--”

“I can’t be responsible for taking his ice cream virginity!”

“Ms. Potts--”

“She’s in Tokyo.”

“Colonel Rhodes--”

“Asleep.”

“Happy--”

“Off the clock.”

“Justin Hammer--”

“Why do you refuse to get ice cream with me? Is it me, or the ice cream?” Tony asks indignantly. Both of those he can deal with, because it’s glaringly obvious what Steve’s going through, and he doesn’t want to admit it, but he can see himself in there, and everything from the past few months rears its head, and it’s apparent that he needs help, but also friends.

Captain America is lonely, who knew?

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Steve says.

“They make sorbet.”

“I don’t like fruit.”

“Coffee.”

“Arrhythmia.”

“Pizza.”

“Allergic.”

“Hot dogs.”

“Vegetarian.”

“Park.”

“Dirty.”

“MoMA.”

“...I hate art.”

Tony pauses for a beat. “So it’s me.”

Steve scowls, “I’m your CO,” he says, like that means anything at all to Tony.

“You’re ten years my junior, and technically you’re not even a Captain.”

“Are you trying to make me hate you?”

“Are you trying to push me away?”

“I--”

Tony moves closer, because that had done something yesterday, “Why, then, did you spend ten minutes lying straight through your teeth?”

“It’s you.”

“Liar.”

Steve grits his teeth so hard Tony surprised that he doesn’t hear them crumble into tiny enamel pieces and fall out of his mouth.

“Did you know,” Steve starts, low enough that it activates his fight-or-flight instincts, “the time you touched me in the kitchen was the first time I’ve been touched… like… like-- without violence or-- or… or--”

And in that moment, he looks so hopelessly lost and broken, even more so than he had on the roof, or with a dislocated shoulder before, or way back when the Battle happened and no one (probably save for Mr. Paranoia, Nicholas J. Fury, himself) had any clue what to do, let alone a kid with maybe a week of basic training, a frisbee and laden with repressed, unnoticed trauma.

Tony comes even closer, where he can see the tiny flecks of green in the shocking, superman-blue of his eyes, and leans up on the tip of his toes to hug him, and grip him tight.

He’s as tense as a marble statue for the first few seconds, before he melts into his hold, collapsing like his strings were cut.

“Thank you,” he says, still holding on, a while later, then, “Sorry.”

“Someone once told me that a team are meant to look out for each other on the field, but I’ve realised that they missed something out. A good, well-functioning team looks out for one another not only on the field, but as friends off it,” Tony says quietly.

The effect isn’t immediate; Steve still stays at SHIELD, just until he’s figured himself out, and all throughout that, Tony makes the effort to go visit him, and Steve, he, but he’s back in the tower for a disastrous Christmas and a delightful New Year.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, Tony, but for as infuriating as you are, you’re the best friend I could have asked for,” Steve says quietly, joining him on the balcony to watch what little stars they can see through the pollution and the firework smoke.

“I know it’s New Year and all, but don’t go getting sappy on me now, Cap,” Tony teases, nudging him, on the precarious line between too drunk and too sober for this conversation.

“Let me thank you,” Steve says, softly, smiling at him, in that brilliant, sunny way he does sometimes. It’s shockingly sobering.

“I did what I wanted after Afghanistan,” Tony says simply, and in that moment they’re not Captain and soldier (not that Tony ever claimed to be that anyway), or friends who, paradoxically, haven’t known each other all too long and yet with far too much history, they just exist, the sounds of the party and the city falling deaf to their ears.

Tony wraps an arm around Steve’s middle, and leans into his, and Steve lays an arm over his shoulders, the weight, to both of them, comforting, quieting.

And neither of them are particularly fond of resolutions, so it’s a mystery as to why exactly, they make small promises to themselves to be better to one another.

(They break it the next day. But it’s always been two back for every one forward, so it’s not surprising, although, both of them would begin to claim that it’s an even one-to-one now.)

**Author's Note:**

> payment in the form of comments, [reblogs](https://au-ti.tumblr.com/post/189135989546/superglued-human) or your right pinky!


End file.
